Facebook Ramping Up the Social in Its Search Engine

As expected, Facebook has started integrating social activity from around the web into the search results on its site, by showing how many people “liked” or shared a specific news story or blog post, as shown in the screenshot below (first noticed by All Facebook). The results are powered by the social-graph plugins embedded in hundreds of thousands of websites, which Facebook launched earlier this year at its F8 conference. The new feature is the latest step in rolling out the network’s social-search engine — which could become a competitive threat for Google and other traditional search companies, as more users turn to recommendations from their networks instead of those determined by algorithms.